Should A Clerkship Application Be Summarily Rejected For Having A Minor Error?

One of my most important roles is advising my students on clerkships. This process has changed significantly since I clerked from 2009-12. (I wrote about my story here.) Back in the day, under the hiring plan, law students would apply to clerkships over the summer after 2L. Judges were only allowed to contact applicants on a particular day in early September. And all interviews would be conducted over the the following week. Of course judges cheated then. Indeed, these "off plan" hires led to the implosion of the plan.

Today, we live in a free-for-all. I am reliably informed that at top-ranked schools, judges interview students and make offers before the first semester of grades are released. Some judges will hire students after they graduate college before they begin law school. Soon enough, high school students will start lining up judicial clerkships. Why wait?

At most other law schools, the clerkship process begins in earnest after two semesters of grades are released. By the time three semesters of grades are released, students are already interviewing for positions and accepting offers. Students can then apply for a second clerkship (the trend) with their fourth semester of grades. Most 3Ls in the clerkship game already have their careers planned out for several years.

As they say, don't hate the player, hate the game. I work closely with my students at South Texas. I would submit that our clerk placement rate rivals schools that have been in the game for far longer. You can see our clerk roster here. But these efforts take a lot of work at very early junctures. Invariably, students have to target specific judges based on a range of factors, and hope the process works out. If they are dinged for unexpected reasons, it may become too late to rally for other judges.

One of the most difficult aspects of this process is the application screen. Imagine a student submits an application with a superlative package. They are top of their class, have glowing references from professors who got to know them personally, thrived on journal and moot court, plus had relevant legal experience. The student has done everything right since they stepped foot on campus. But there is a glitch in the resume or the cover letter or the writing sample. Mind you, these materials have been reviewed by the student countless times, and also screened by professors and career service staff. Yet, something slipped through.

Should the application automatically be nixed? I can see both sides of the equation.

On the one hand, judges need to be able to implicitly rely on a clerk. That relationship requires that the student to have an exceptional attention to detail. Any error that leaves chambers ultimately falls to the judge, not the clerk. As the argument goes, if a student can submit a clerkship application with an error, that shows a lack of judgment that will infect the entire clerkship. How can this student be trusted? Application rejected. And for what it's worth, when a clerk application is rejected, the applicant will seldom figure out why. After years of excellent work, a stray hyphen or a margin error can quietly disqualify the candidate from a career-altering clerkship.

On the other hand, a clerkship application must be viewed as a whole. The resume is the sort of document that is reviewed so many times that errors become invisible. I think most professors have experienced this sort of fatigue when reviewing the same law review article through multiple rounds. Litigators have similar experience with briefs. The usual remedy is to have a fresh set of eyes to look over the materials--whether research assistants, student editors, or fellow associates. But doesn't that fresh look defeat a primary purpose of the application: to determine the applicant's attention to detail. Thus, there is a paradox. Applicants who try to play by the rules, and do not seek outside help, are more likely to include disqualifying errors. Applicants who skirt the rules, and seek outside help, are less likely to include disqualifying errors, and the judge will never know it. And now with AI, I have very little trust that the work students submit is actually their work. The importance of the written application becomes far less than the value of the references.

As regular readers of my posts can guess, I am not one to disqualify people for small errors--especially when the application is otherwise excellent. We should never judge a person by their worst moment, especially when every other aspect of the application is golden. Are typos and errors a problem for courts? You bet they are. Don't believe me? The Supreme Court has an errata page for all of the corrections to opinions. Mind you, these are opinions reviewed by some of the smartest law school graduates around and double-checked a full staff of editors at the Court who scan citations. Errors will always slip through. It's okay. I think most parties would rather have a timely opinion that gets the law right than an absolutely flawless opinion that takes far longer.

Still, I warn all of my students that failure to strictly scrutinize their clerkship applications could lead to a summary rejection, and they will never know it. It can't be my job to find these errors, so the burden falls on them.

Comments

[ButWhatDoIKnow]

During my 30-year career as a corporate & securities paralegal, and no matter my place of employment, I kept this framed quote hung in a location visible from my desk chair. It served as a constant reminder of human fallibility, no matter how diligent the effort.
**********************
"The Perfect Book"
By William Keddie
The Foulis’s editions of classical works were much praised by scholars and collectors in the nineteenth century. The celebrated Glasgow publishers once attempted to issue a book which should be a perfect specimen of typographical accuracy. Every precaution was taken to secure the desired result. Six experienced proof-readers were employed, who devoted hours to the reading of each page; and after it was thought to be perfect, it was posted up in the hall of the university, with a notification that a reward of fifty pounds would be paid to any person who could discover an error. Each page was suffered to remain two weeks in the place where it had been posted, before the work was printed, and the printers thought that they had attained the object for which they had been striving. When the work was issued, it was discovered that several errors had been committed, one of which was in the first line of the first page.
As found in "A Passion for Books," by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan.

[Drewski]

Oh, well, I guess if fictional characters in a story can't do it then it can't be done.

[John F. Carr]

A technical book was published on the family Chironomidae, a common group of midges found mostly around bodies of fresh water. From the errata list to the first edition:

In Table of Contents – “Chironomidae” is misspelled in the first line

Before the first line of regular text, and the very subject of the book is spelled wrong.

Of interest to legal scholars, surveys of water quality often include putting midge larvae under microscopes looking for tiny features because that is the only way to get a species-level identification. Perhaps your next Enviromental Impact Study will have midges in it.

[Zarniwoop]

"Make sure it's flawless" is never bad advice for career-altering document submissions.

That said, when I reviewed incoming applications to replace me as a law clerk (Federal district court, mid 2000s), the process was more of an initial low-pass filter than "rejected due to improper use of em dash instead of hyphen" tomfoolery. Judge made the substantive calls on who to interview, from a decently wide pool ... but a filtered pool, not raw effluent.

[John Mosby]

Prof, nice touch filling the post with errors! I presume they were deliberate. CC, JSM

[Botaglove]

What a pointless thing to worry about. Doesn't Blackman have anything else to do than worry about typos? There's a lot of sucking up for Blackman to do that he is slacking off on.

[Area Man]

In my one and (hopefully) only trip to SCOTUS, I made a relatively minor typo in my brief, but a typo nonetheless. I must’ve proofread that brief about 100 times before I submitted it, not to mention all the other people I had read through it. But the mistake got through anyway. It happens.

The most hilarious typo I’ve ever seen, though, was in an opinion from my state’s high court. It had a footnote that referenced itself, something like “49. See supra n.49.” I used to work at that court, and opinions go through many rounds of review before they’re released, so it’s insane that such an obvious error slipped through. But, like I said, it happens.

[ah....Clem]

Minor errors like a typo? Not a problem as far as I can see.

But there's no getting around the major error of admitting you are attending The South Texas College of Law.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Justice Blackman interviews a potential clerk ...

"I see you included two errors in your application, even after you said you carefully prepared. So, I know the errors must have been intentional since you are not one to lie.

I won't hire you. I am proud of your courage. But only I get to have THAT much courage."

[Scribe]

Hey, it happens. My student law review note has a typo in the first sentence that slid through all the layers of proofreading and spading. A letter "m" where an "n" should have been. Changed one word to another similar word, changed the meaning of the quote it was in.

I caught it about 5 years or so afterward.

I think I am the only person who ever noticed it.

30 plus years later it still grates.

I guess the last line of defense is what we used to do while spading: two students read the document, one out loud, one following along, going backwards, one word at a time. Alternating being the reader and follower every paragraph.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

I have found that reading something backwards helps focus on the typoes and grammar.

[John F. Carr]

"rn" and "in" look a lot like "m" in some fonts. Or if you're reading Turkish, "ın" vs. "m". Turkish includes a variant of the letter i with no dot.

[rswallen]

Yh, this is "Eats, shoots and leaves"/"Let's eat Grandma" territory.

[Tallman]

These positions get huge numbers of applicants because they are the golden ticket to a few million in additional lifetime earnings. Given that, screeners are desperate for anything that can reduce the pile….so stupid things suddenly matter.

The big question is how do we structure society such that being slightly over or under a (largely subjective) line isn’t so impactful ie so success in life isn’t so random?

[Moderation4ever]

Maybe one of the first things needed is to stop being so selective in the nomination process for SCOTUS. I always wonder why it seems that only Harvard and Yale graduates are acceptable. While I may not agree much with Amy Coney Barrett I was happy to see her law degree was from Notre Dame. Chief Justice Burger's law degree was from Minnesota. So maybe if we let in a few more law schools and did not insist on clerking for a SC Justice we would not have to worry so much about the perfect application. I think we might also have a better Court.

[David Nieporent]

Chief Justice Burger's law degree was from Minnesota.

Not really sure that's the best argument for your proposal.

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Of the options offered, I appreciated that Barrett brought some novelty over the usual suspects.

We need more diversity, though not just regarding colleges. Someone with more political experience, for instance, could be helpful.

Modern choices were often too focused on lower court judges (there are reasons for this, but it is still not ideal), who, if anything, only had executive experience in the national government.

There used to be many more justices with state and legislative experience. Kagan and Barrett (like Scalia) also bring some scholarship cred. Kagan was solicitor general but was in academia longer.

[John F. Carr]

In government research funding, a lot of effort is spent drawing fine distinctions among applications to decide which barely make the cut and which barely miss the cut. There are many more applications than funds available. Some have suggested putting all the applications that are good enough to fund in a bucket and drawing randomly. Does it really matter if an application is 85th percentile or 86th percentile? Probably not.

[Stepped Reckoner]

I spent a sizable fraction of my 2L year applying for, and traveling around the U.S. on my own dime to interview for, a federal clerkship. I sent out about a hundred applications. I ended up getting the job I wanted, in chambers in my favorite city. And it was only afterward that I discovered that my application’s cover letter, on which I’d slaved for draft after draft for over a week, had a huge honking typo—right there, big as life, just flat impossible to miss.

Should I have cheated and had someone help with my application? If I had, would I be on the Supreme Court by now? Sure buddy. Give me a break. I can’t complain: I got the job I wanted. But Josh is right: this is something that no amount of care or checking seems to be able to stop. Perfection exists only in Heaven.

[David Nieporent]

Despite how Blackman framed it, does asking someone to proofread — especially a cover letter! — constitute "cheating"?

[Orin S. Kerr]

"Every lawyer and every judge can recite examples of documents that they wrote, checked, and doublechecked, but that still contained glaring errors." Groh v. Ramirez, 540 U.S. 551 , 568 (2004) (Kennedy, J., dissenting).

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Also: " We all tend toward myopia when looking for our own errors."

[Davy C]

Applicants who try to play by the rules, and do not seek outside help, are more likely to include disqualifying errors.

Do the rules really say you cannot get anyone to even review your application for typos?

[Sarcastr0]

I have found typo patrol to be a good use case for LLMs.

[David Nieporent]

Surely a J.D. would be sufficient, and probably a bachelor's would be enough.

[rswallen]

I think Sarc is referring to Large Language Models, like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT etc.

[Sarcastr0]

I think DMN was making a pretty decent dad joke.

[Vryedni]

Don't encourage him.

[Incunabulum]

>Should A Clerkship Application Be Summarily Rejected For Having A Minor Error?

1. Depends on how many applicants you have for the position.

2. And the sort of judge that would reject such a candidate is maybe the sort of judge that it would be absolutely miserable to work with and thus by not interfering you're helping the applicant dodge a bullet;)

[Incunabulum]

> Indeed, these "off plan" hires led to the implosion of the plan. . . Today, we live in a free-for-all.

No, you were always in a free-for-all - you just didn't know it. Now at least they're honest.

[Incunabulum]

>Any error that leaves chambers ultimately falls to the judge, not the clerk.

I'm pretty sure VC hosts multiple posts about judges that have thrown their clerks under the bus for mistakes that left chambers.

Lawyers do it as a matter of course in front of judges, why would a lawyer stop doing it when they become a judge?

[Incunabulum]

>But doesn't that fresh look defeat a primary purpose of the application: to determine the applicant's attention to detail.

No. There is no paradox. Knowing when to get a second set of eyes (or a third or a fourth) is part of the process, attention to detail is just the beginning.

You're not bespoke artisans crafting masterworks of art from internal inspirations no one else can understand - you're technical staff producing a product.

[Incunabulum]

>And now with AI, I have very little trust that the work students submit is actually their work. The importance of the written application becomes far less than the value of the references.

I would think a cursory search would expose all the AI hallucinations - that's on top of the characteristic weird writing style of AI (granted, in 10 years this may not be a reliable indicator).

For the last part - technology changes, culture changes, you will have to figure out how to manage your applicants, including whether or not clerkships are even necessary any more if AI can do it.

[Incunabulum]

Finally?

Most typos are not minor errors. You aren't using a typewriter anymore, typos are underlined throughout your text (which can also scan the grammar so it will use the proper it's/its and similar mistakes).

Except for the extremely rare typos for words that are uncommon enough to not be in your WP dictionary or words where you put a similar sounding but spelt differently word in.

First Bass? Base Fish?

[The Folding Attorney]

I am a picky reader; I warn my undergraduate students to *at least* run Microsoft's Editor command on their documents before submitting them. It catches a lot.

Unfortunately, I'm less picky as a writer...but I do try. I tend to go over things I'm submitting to the Court with a fine-toothed comb, but my blog is full of typos. So it goes.

One has to be careful of other things, too. When I was an undergraduate, my sociological theory professor (who had been a classmate of C. Wright Mills) told a story. Mills and his adviser apparently did not get along, and when Mills used the term 'pragmaticism' as well as 'pragmatism' in his dissertation, the adviser, thinking these were typos, blue-penciled the dissertation. Following Mills's successful thesis defense (and explanation of his language), his adviser (supposedly) threw the dissertation at Mills and told him to erase the markings. Mills (supposedly) handed it back, saying he would leave that task to his esteemed adviser. Which nearly resulted in fisticuffs. Sometimes an apparent typo *isn't* a typo.

[KenveeB]

I wouldn't automatically disqualify someone for 1-2 typos, as long as they're nothing that would change the understanding of the text. But if I'm faced with two similar applicants and only one has typos, I'm much more like to go for the one without. Numerous typos throughout would definitely go to the bottom of the stack.